Anant Agarwal named Director of CSAIL, selects Terman as Co-Director

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Monday, June 20, 2011 (All day)

Anant Agarwal, member of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT, has been named the next director of CSAIL, effective July 1, 2011, as announced on the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory website.

Agarwal will succeed Professor Victor Zue, who has served four years as CSAILs director, four years as the labs co-director and two years as the director of the Lab for Computer Science (LCS).

Ian Waitz, Dean of the School of Engineering, credited Zue for many years of outstanding leadership at CSAIL, and thanked him for his service and dedication to the lab.

Agarwal is looking to build upon Zues successful tenure as CSAIL director, which saw the expansion of the lab and the founding of a thriving Industry Affiliates Program, among many other accomplishments.

Agarwal is the leader of the Carbon Research Group at CSAIL, which is dedicated to researching and developing operating systems and architectures for multicore and cloud computing. Currently, he leads Project Angstrom, a multidisciplinary research endeavor uniting scientists from top universities and industry collaborators in an effort to develop a new multicore architecture for exascale computing. Agarwal is the founder and CTO of Tilera Corporation, where the Tile multicore processor was created. Additionally, he led the development of Raw, an early 16-core tiled multicore processor; Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor; and the VirtualWires project at MIT. Agarwal founded Virtual Machine Works, which was responsible for bringing VirtualWires technology to market.

Agarwal received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, where he was advised by Stanford University President John Hennessy, and his bachelors degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

"This is a significant responsibility--CSAIL is MIT's largest interdepartmental lab with 900 members and 90 principal investigators from eight departments," said Waitz. "It is an exceptionally talented group---CSAIL students, faculty, and staff have received a long list of major awards, and the community includes 33 members of the National Academies. I look forward to Anant's vision and enthusiasm as he takes on this important leadership role."

Professor Anant Agarwal, director of CSAIL as of July 1, has announced that Chris Terman will serve as co-director of the lab.

Terman is a senior lecturer in EECS and has served as an associate director in both LCS and CSAIL. He serves as the research director for the T-Party Project, a 10-year, $45-million research collaboration with Quanta Computer. He is actively involved in teaching courses 6.02, 6.004, 6.111, 6.173 and 6.371 and also serves as the EECS undergraduate officer.

Terman received his B.S. in Physics from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from MIT. His appointment is effective as of July 1.